This Sunday at 8 p.m. at Ör Gallery and Tavern in Hudson, NY: a Fence Digital Poetry Live Reading, featuring Matthew Klane, Michael Leong, and a reading of writing by the late Brian Young.

The reading celebrates the launch of Fence Digital, a new electronic imprint of Fence Books, publishing multimedia electronic poetry, fiction, and hybrid texts that reinvest digitization with materiality, treating the screen as a skin. This continues Fence's mission to redefine the terms of accessibility by the sharing of material texts across a variety of electronic formats.

MATTHEW KLANE is co-editor at Flim Forum Press. His books include Canyons (Flim Forum, 2016), Che (Stockport Flats, 2013) and B (Stockport Flats, 2008). An e-chapbook from Of the Day is online at Delete Press. He currently lives and writes in Albany, NY, where he co-curates the Yes! Poetry & Performance Series and teaches at Russell Sage College.

Michael Leong is the author of e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009) and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The &NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? is a collection of 99 fragments, aphorisms, and typographic poems. By turns gnomic, rhetorically playful, lyric, and apocalyptic, these distilled and minimalist texts were painstakingly typeset and printed by hand with a Trodat 5253 Self-Inking Custom Stamp, a mechanism that accommodates three and four millimeter rubber type. The goal of Leong's ascetic practice of "stenography" (literally meaning "narrow writing") was to impress a surface, to put it "under an impression" (in the way one is "put under" hypnosis). The poems were then transmediated and transformed to create a visually striking blend of digital and analog textures. The color-coded pages of the book feature special buttons that allow for multiple pathways of reading: Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? is a hypertextual, hypermaterial experience.

Brian Young was the author of the poetry collections The Full Night Still in the Street Water (University of Nevada Press) and Site Acquisition (Fence Books), as well as several chapbooks. He died from a respiratory illness in 2014, at the age of 54. Several months before that, he received a package from his family that included his “My Progress in Kindergarten” report card. Even at age 5, Brian received his lowest marks in the category “I follow school rules”—an anti-position he maintained vibrantly in all his writing, thinking, and living.

In poetry, photos, and hyperlinks Moonie maps the author’s final road trip through the American Southwest. As the Tea Party crashes the camper's pastoral and security checkpoints gird the scenic wayside, the wild geographies he roams in late 2010 are inversely mirrored in national discourses calling for ever more extreme versions of conformity. But in spite of these climates, Young believes that somewhere in these geographies “someone is bound to be holding a stalk of certainty," to be trusted if you travel off the centralized routes.